Foreign Digest: Russia, Montenegro, Serbia and Kosovo

Russia: A film about Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader imprisoned by the despotic regime of ex-Soviet intelligence agent Vladimir Putin, won the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Award last week for best documentary. The center-right leader’s wife accepted the award in America on his behalf, expressing the dream of a free and representative Russia. Also last week, Italy and a European Union official accused Kremlin-associated Russian mercenaries of stirring up the conditions to increase the deadly migration of refugees from Africa to Europe, as a form of hybrid warfare against the West. And the former Soviet Republic of Moldova accused Russia of attempting an influence operation to turn it into a satellite state, like Belarus. I had posted last month that Moldova, where Russia keeps troops in a breakaway part of Moldovia without its consent inhabited by ethnic Russians, had accused Russia of attempting a coup d’etat. Meanwhile, the International Court of Criminal Justice has issued an arrest warrant against Putin for war crimes during the Russian invasion of the former Soviet Republic of Ukraine, specifically for kidnapping Ukrainian children. Ukraine, the United States and its allies, the United Nations and others have accumulated abundant evidence of thousands of Russian war crimes, including the deliberate military targeting of civilians without any valid military purpose, torturing and executing prisoners, and kidnapping civilians, both adults and children. Russia denies the Court’s jurisdiction. Putin dreams of restoring the Soviet Union. Montenegro: Presidential elections are being held today in the ex-Yugoslav Republic of Montenegro, in which the current President and the pro-Serbian opposition leader are expected to win the most votes, but not enough for a majority. They would then both face each other in a run-off election. The elections are taking place amidst an ongoing political crisis in which multiple attempts to form a government have failed, leading to the calling of the next parliamentary elections in June. Serbia and Kosovo: Serbia and Kosovo reached an agreement today in the former Yugoslav Republic of North Macedonia that was mediated by Albania and the European Union to normalize relations, although it does not include any Serbian recognition of the independence of its former province. It establishes a Serbian Community. Serbs are a minority in the mostly Albanian Kosovo. The former Yugoslav Republic of Serbia is the rump portion of that former Slavic State of the volatile Western Balkans. After the breakup of the former Communist Yugoslavia in 1991, Serbia and ethnic Serbs in the various Republics and later the province of Kosovo attempted in a series of bloody wars to prevent their independence or to establish breakaway Serbian States within them. The agreement, which requires parliamentary approval and then implementation, eases tensions that had increased lately and is a necessary step for possible Serbian admission into the E.U.